Month: January 2010

A federal appeals court in Atlanta has upheld the decision of a federal district court in Florida to vacate permits for limestone mining along a strip of former wetlands west of Miami.

Posted on Fri, Jan. 22, 2010

Appeals court upholds vacating of mining permits

The Associated Press

A federal appeals court in Atlanta has upheld the decision of a federal district court in Florida to vacate permits for limestone mining along a strip of former wetlands west of Miami.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the opinion Thursday regarding wetlands known as the “Lake Belt.”

U.S. District Judge Jack Camp, who sat on the panel, wrote in the opinion that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida “did not err” in January 2009 when it vacated the permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers to several limestone mining companies.

The permits are required to extract limestone from the Lake Belt, home to four of Florida’s largest mines, which supply about half of the state’s cement. The 57,500-acre region, which borders the eastern edge of Everglades National Park, also provides 40 percent of Miami-Dade County’s drinking water. There has been mining in the region since the 1950s, creating thousands of acres of lakes.

The 11th Circuit upheld the district court’s finding that the Corps failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act “because it did not take into consideration the impact that limestone mining would have on municipal water supplies, including the potential costs of upgrading water treatment plants,” Camp writes.

The litigation pits the interests of the mining companies against “the need for public drinking water in the Miami-Dade area” and “the protection and restoration of the ecology of South Florida, increasingly threatened by mining, development, and agriculture,” Camp writes.

The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and National Parks Conservation Association filed a lawsuit in 2002 challenging the validity of nine 10-year permits issued by the Corps.

In their letter the EPA reminded the Corps that the Peace River watershed is of special importance to both the state and the federal government, and that EPA has stated in documents dating back to the summer of 2007 that “…this mine expansion project, as well as any proposed mining projects within the Peace River phosphate region, a current, area-wide Environmental Impact Statement is most needed in order to address the extensive cumulative impacts and changes to these watersheds due to the phosphate mining industry.”

Perhaps by dark night or quiet morning when Ernie Estevez slides into the gentle waters of the lower Peace River — when sometimes little or no sign of a century of hard use exists up river or down — he begins to think of it as the Tallackchopo, so named by the Seminoles in tribute to the wild peas once said to cover its banks.

(Mosaic’s response to the Sierra Club letter)
A recent Herald-Tribune column by Cris Costello, a paid opponent of the Florida phosphate industry, paints a deceptive picture of our industry and my company.

Recently many Florida newspapers carried a 12-page advertising supplement from The Mosaic Co. with images of happy families and wildlife. Mosaic is the large Minnesota-based corporation which operates almost all of the phosphate mines in Central Florida.

MANATEE — Mosaic Co., a local producer and marketer of phosphate and potash for the agriculture industry, is celebrating its fifth anniversary by making cash and food donations to local communities and handing out dividends to stockholders.

A coalition of five environmental organizations – National Wildlife Federation, Florida Wildlife Federation, Conservancy of Southwest Florida, Collier County Audubon Society and National Audubon Society, opposing golf course and residential developments in a wetland slough flowing from Corkscrew Swamp, saw their federal lawsuit decided in their favor. Federal circuit court judge Jose Martinez has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers did not do adequate accounting of the cumulative impacts to this watershed due to numerous developments being proposed in wetlands. In response to thelawsuit the environmental groups filed against the Corps and the US Fish and Wildlife Service back in 2008, Judge Martinez revoked the federal permit to destroy 645 acres of wetlands for Mirasol and invalidated the biological opinion written by the USFWS on level of threat to endangered wood storks nesting at Corkscrew Swamp. The environmental coalition has also filed a similar lawsuit against the adjacent Saturnia Falls project and anticipate a ruling on this case soon.